Archive for December 2nd, 2013

Moving to cloud enabled services is inevitable and in my day job I get a chance to work on various technologies including Windows Azure. One of the tools I use big time is the Azure Storage Explorer. This is an awesome tool when we need to view or storage account. When playing around with SQL Server SSMS, I found it interesting to see we can query and look at Azure Storage using SSMS itself (lesser known to many – available even with SQL 2012). This was an interesting hidden gem which I thought was worth sharing with all.

To start this journey, the first step is to get the details of your storage account. On your Azure portal, Select “Storage”, Select the “Storage account” (mtcvinod in my example) and Select “Manage Access Keys”.

You will be presented with the Access Keys to your storage account. I have greyed out the values for obvious reasons you can guess :) … Select the “Copy” Button (before the regenerate button and close the dialog.

We will be presented with the dialog to what Storage account. Key-in your storage account and the Account Key you just copies from the above step. Click on Connect and we are good.

Now you will see the tree view structure on your SQL Server Management studio to all the blobs and objects inside that storage account.

I know this is just a start to viewing the Azure Storage account but the Azure Storage Explorer does a lot more than what SSMS can do. But given the quick access to this can always prove to be handy. Do let me know if you have every used this feature in your environments.